Heard in Berlin

Heard in Berlin

27 July, 2009 | 7.44AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: dj charts, heard in berlin

Last night, a gay friend in leather trousers saved my life. It had been a shitty day. A thief stole my laptop and camera causing a gaping hole of self-pity that threatened to consume me. “Screw it, let’s get drunk and have a proper Berlin night,” he said, knowing that a dancefloor can cure life’s little problems.

By 3am, we stood outside the half completed Dice club, in an abandoned electricity station in the heart of Mitte. Three large shadows of men indicated that there was something at the end of the alleyway. Inside, rippled concrete walls enclosed a main dancefloor, empty, except for the reverberation of techno. In a back room, a hundred or so basked in pulsating LED lights that spanned the entire length of the room. We were inside a giant disco ball.

A female DJ dropped the driving minimal cut Pierce & Phunklarique ‘Swoosh’ (Kaiserdisco Remix), and the walls turned red.

The building, which used to secretly power the Stasi so they could monitor Berliners, looked uncomfortable in its new role. Its sinister concrete and cold metal staircases, were never meant to feel the warmth of human happiness.

Because the club has not yet officially opened, it wasn’t very busy, so we headed to Watergate for a Motivbank party with Reboot, Guido Schneider, Buck, and Clé.

The small, but perfectly harmonious dancefloor downstairs had pretty boys in oversized vests bopping next to young girls in comfortable shoes. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air, the music of motion clunked out of hidden speakers. DJ Buck, an Italian new comer, funked up the floor with Nick Curly’s engrossing ‘Happy Five’, before pushing fully into trumpet territory later with Dop’s ‘Vsop’.

Too happy to ignore, my body loosened as the scaffolding of my earlier sorrow tumbled slowly down. Next came laughter, as my friend in leather trousers flashed his white behind to a group of horrified girls. The Persuader’s ‘What Time Is It, Mr Templar?’, a masterful techno cut from 1997 produced by the then unknown Swede Jesper Dahlback, then convinced me that everything was going to be just fine. There, there.

On the way home, as I munched on a hot dog, watching the peacefully bright streets swish past the taxi window, I thanked dance music for the escapism it provides. Berlin’s Melt Festival had offered a similar feeling the weekend before.

The surreal, the illusory, the imaginary, and the fantasy enticed 30,000 people to Melt’s post-apocalyptic setting of Ferropolis, a two hour train ride from Berlin. Five hulking abandoned coal diggers, rusted by the rain, surrounded the festival grounds.

It was like a distant planet in deep space, and it could not have been a more perfect site for ignoring reality.

The festival was sold out, most likely because of the impressive mosaic of artists patched together for its three-day journey of music discovery.

Whilst headliners like Oasis and The Klaxons enthralled the masses, it was the fringe electronic acts that inspired the most.

Aphex Twin’s aural and visual tsunami on Friday night upended the notion that festival sets need a certain amount of crowd pleasers. The Warp Records man’s twisted and layered symphony didn’t contain one recognizable note.

An angry storm forced Moderat to cancel their much-anticipated live show, but at least the dance stage was treated to Apparat’s beautifully evolved remix of Swayzak ‘Smile And Receive’.

Hudson Mohake demonstrated why they’re one of the hottest newcomers in British electronic music with a live set that included their r&b dubstep soundclash ‘Overnight’.

The track’s jumbled up vocals, that sound like the last vestiges of a strangled Destiny’s Child song, fitted well with Major Lazer ‘Hold The Line’, a dub reggae track that seemed to be in every corner of the festival, like a weed dealer smirking through busted teeth.

As the stars twinkled through the haze above, one mystical Melt night, Plastikman’s 303-driven acid lines on ‘Glob’ echoed across the grounds, ricocheting off various surfaces.

You would never have guessed that the track was made way back in 1993 (it was on Hawtin’s debut LP ‘Sheet One’), as the track sounds cinematically sci-fi at high volume.

Later James Holden reminded us all of his production prowess, by dropping his brilliant remix of Andre Kraml ‘Safari’, a bass-driven melodic minimal cut with one supreme breakdown.

We had come to Melt to run away from life itself, to elude the undesirable machinations of the day-to-day, and we returned with a new found taste for things.

In Berlin, there are plenty of places to hide, plenty of places to escape. Even last night, whilst the rest of the world wound down their Sunday for another work week, Shed and the rest of the Hardwax posse dropped future rhythms at Club Horst in Hallesches Tor, including the rave-flavoured r&b cut Joker and Ginz ‘Purple City’.

Keep moving, it said. Dance it off, bitch.

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